Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Thursday, June 20, 2013

Syria - Revolution and History

Syria is the victim of its own
murderous ethnic and religious competition but also, it is the play thing
of superpowers and competing imperial aspirants for Islamic Colonial ambitions.

Western funding of the Syrian
opposition is now under active discussion. We are informed that it is the only
way to prevent further mass slaughter from occurring in Syria (and
perhaps spreading beyond its borders).But Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar already fund the Syrian
opposition. They have armed the thousands of fighters whose hostility to the
secular ‘democratic’ opposition will openly express itself once Assad’s regime
has fallen.

Revolutionary causes have a long
and dishonorable history of settling scores in their quest for absolute
power.In the pursuit of perfection,
repression is the States favored instrument for enforcing unity. The Utopian
dreams of the French Revolution soon turned into the Reign of Terror, Russia’s
Bolshevik Revolution became the Red Terror and the Iranian Revolution quickly
found reason to lethally suppress all opposition.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei was President of Iran during this pivotal early period of state
‘consolidation’ while the recently elected President of Iran (Hassan Rohani)
was Khamenei’s personal representative to the Iranian National Security Council
from 1989 until 2005.Continuity in
conflict is a core belief of the radical racist Iranian regime.

This short reminder of
revolutionary history and its malevolent predisposition to violence is not
meant to be a warning against political change but only as a warning against
becoming embroiled in the inevitable Syrian bloodbath. In the previous article
I quoted Shoshana Bye – she stated that:“It is not about allies and friends – it is about history and
interests.” Defining the situational aspect of the conflict is an issue that
directly impacts our response to the ongoing conflict.When we choose sides it must be for the right
reason and not political expediency. When we pour arms into a conflict that has
no clear good guys and bad guys we are simply adding oil to the inevitable
inferno.If we arm the Syrian rebels
then Russia and Iran will arm
Assad and Hezbollah. The quality and the lethality of the weaponry in use will
increase with ever more devastating consequences.

The nightmare scenario for Syria is that it will become the new Lebanon. At the
height of the Lebanese civil war 22 separate militias acted independently
within Lebanon.
They represented the disparate religious and ethnic groups; allegiances and
alliances changed according to the persuasive powers of the warlord with the
biggest gun.

Syria
is 18 times as large in land area as Lebanon
and has 5 times the population but this only means the carnage could be
considerably worse than what Lebanon
suffered during the civil war it fought between 1975 and 1990.

A brief summary of the main
players follows:

The FSA (Free Syrian Army) is a
loose band of opposition parties fighting to defeat the regime. Its leader Riad
al-Asaad stated that the FSA had no political goals except the removal of
President Assad.The problem is that
fighting along side of the FSA are al-Qaeda affiliated bands of militants, many
of its own members are from the Muslim Brotherhood and some will be from the
even more violently racist Salafist movement. There is an inherent weakness in
the opposition that fails to provide it with a cohesive focus.

Apocalyptic rhetoric has usually
been reserved for Iran’s
irrational leader’s religious belligerence and through Shiite Iran’s
Revolutionary Guard, its international agencies, but it isalso a characteristic
of Sunni extremism expressed via al-Qaeda (and its world-wide affiliates).

Iran has been pouring arms and
manpower into the Syrian conflict in support of its Shia ally for many years. This was acknowledged by General Mohammad Ali
Jafari (Commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard) when he said that Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards (the elite special operations unit ‘al-Quds force’) were
present in Syria and Lebanon - but only to provide
"counsel."It was the first
time the Guards had publicly acknowledged the presence of al-Quds members in Syria. (Ynet 16
Sept, 2012)

If Bashar al-Assad survives, Iran will have a far more significant influence
over Syria than it does
today and Lebanon
will once again tremble.If the regime
survives, Iran will control
an arc of radicalized Shiite states stretching from Western Afghanistan through
Iraq into Syria and ending in Lebanon. It will embolden radicals
in Iraq and Iran.If the Shiite Syrian bloc is destroyed a
Sunni regime will emerge from the ashes of the Alawite dictatorship.Almost certainly it will be hostile to Iran, the Iranian presence in Lebanon and
elsewhere.

Ancient indigenous Christian
communities have been everywhere in the Arab world, passionately more pro-Arab
than their Muslim neighbours. This demonstrable fealty protected the faithful. But
it no longer works in Iraq
nor has it protected Egyptian Copts.Both communities have suffered marginalization and dispossession. In Iraq we must
speak of the ethnic cleansing of the ancient Iraqi Christian communities,
reduced to no more than a quarter of their size in a quarter of a century.They are doomed to extinction as was the
Jewish community before them. But the international community will not
deliberate on either of these crimes against humanity.

The same fate of dispossession that
befell the regions indigenous Jewish population now almost certainly awaits Syria’s
Christians.

If the human story is about
history and interests and not about choosing between good and evil then we have not learned from
the carnage of the twentieth century.Pain and suspicion are godparents to human conflict.Nourished by superstition and greed they
represent an inability to look beyond narrow historical considerations.

If Russia
and the USA cannot bring
about a peaceful resolution of the Syrian conflict there is little hope for
anywhere else in the Mediterranean
Basin.That basin extends into Western Asia and
North Africa but it also serves as the gateway to Europe.Its destabilization serves Iran on one
side and al-Qaeda on the other. The Hapsburg Empire was known as the Sick man
of Europe and its decline led to World War
1.Syria could similarly trigger the
next world war.